Will Trump face charges?

THE only Democrat on Georgia’s state election board on Sunday called on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Republican) to investigate possible civil and criminal violations committed by President Donald Trump during a phone call over the weekend in which the president pressured Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat.

David J Worley, an Atlanta lawyer, said a transcript of the hour-long call, a recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post, amounted to “probable cause” to believe that Trump had violated Georgia’s election code.

“It’s a crime to solicit election fraud, and asking the secretary to change the votes is a textbook definition of election fraud,” he said in an interview on Sunday.

In his letter to Raffensperger, Worley said that “such an incident, splashed as it is across every local and national news outlet, cannot be ignored or brushed aside”.

Worley cited Georgia state code 21-2-604, which makes it a crime to solicit someone else to commit election fraud. Such a violation can be punished by up to three years in prison.

Meanwhile, after the extraordinary phone call between Trump and Raffensperger, many observers shared one question: Did Trump break the law?

In the course of the hour-long call on Saturday, Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat and threatened him with vague legal consequences, seemingly encouraging his fellow Republican to fix the election results.

As the sole Democrat on Georgia’s state election board yesterday urged Raffensperger to investigate the president over the call, some lawyers and legal scholars say Trump’s actions indeed appeared to violate both state and federal criminal statutes.

The question, according to Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, is whether Trump was “knowingly and wilfully” pressuring Raffensperger to count non-existent votes.

“Either the president was engaged in the commission of a felony,” he said, “or he has lost his hold on reality such that he can no longer distinguish fact from the fictions he has been fed”.

On the state level, Trump’s call could also have violated a Georgia statute.

Leigh Ann Webster, a criminal defence attorney in Atlanta, said in Georgia, Trump could run afoul of a state law that makes it illegal to cause someone else to participate in election fraud – by soliciting, requesting or commanding it.

And whether Trump broke federal state law, it’s a different question whether any prosecutor would try to charge him.

Until Biden is sworn in on January 20, legal experts say there is virtually no chance of federal charges being filed.

Besides the short time frame, Levitt said, the Justice Department maintains a long-standing principle that a federal prosecutor may not prosecute a sitting president.

No such principle exists once a commander in chief is out of office. Yet under a Biden administration, going after Trump in the courts could be a politically fraught choice.

Trevor Potter, a Republican and former Federal Election Commission chairperson who was appointed by President George HW Bush, told the New York Times “there is a good argument” that Trump had been pushing for a fraudulent vote count during the call. |